Hitchhiking to Burning Man... He Found Christ Instead | Landon Scates Testimony | Ep. 131
There's a particular kind of restlessness that only shows up when you've walked away from God and haven't yet found anything that fills the space He left. My friend Landon Scates knows that restlessness intimately, and on this episode of the Raised & Redeemed podcast, he sat down with me to tell the whole story.
Landon is an Orthodox Christian now. A husband. A dad. But getting here took him through some of the darkest roads a person can walk — literally.
A Childhood Faith, and a Final Step Away
Landon didn't grow up a stranger to God. Like a lot of us, he had a childhood faith, even if it was simple. But somewhere along the way, that faith couldn't hold against the pull of the world, and he took the final step away from it. What followed wasn't a dramatic rebellion so much as a slow drift into a life lived without God in it, and the quiet ache of meaninglessness that came with it.
Seeking Meaning in All the Wrong Places
Landon got stuck, and when the ache for meaning got loud enough, he went looking for it the way a lot of us do when we don't know where else to look — he turned toward the occult.
It didn't satisfy him. So he did something more drastic: he set out on foot, backpacking across the country to try to find himself. That search took him through an unexpected encounter with a stranger on the road, weeks of panhandling on the streets of Las Vegas, and eventually, hitchhiking all the way to Burning Man — chasing some kind of transcendence in the middle of the desert.
A Call from Heaven
On the long, empty walk away from Burning Man, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing around him but desert, Christ met him.
Not in a church. Not in a moment he was looking for it. On a desert road.
Learning to Follow God, and Getting Lost Again
Encountering Christ was just the beginning. Landon spent the next stretch of his life learning how to actually follow God, and like so many new believers, he found his way into the born-again, charismatic Christian world. It's a familiar pipeline for a lot of converts — and Landon's honest about where it led him next: deliverance ministries, and an experience there that he now describes, soberly, as a kind of possession rather than healing.
It's a hard part of the story. But it's an important one, because it's where Landon started asking harder questions about what the Church actually is, and where true healing actually comes from.
Coming Home to the Ancient Church
Landon's search eventually led him through the deceptions he found in Protestant and home church settings, and into a deeper search for the true Church — the one that's existed, unbroken, since the apostles. That search ended in Orthodoxy.
Today, Landon talks openly about the miracles he believes are still happening in the Church, in his own life, and in the lives of people around him.
🎧 Listen to the full episode now on Raised & Redeemed, wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the full conversation on YouTube.
If you've walked a similarly winding road — through the occult, through charismatic deception, through searching — I'd love to hear your story. Drop it in the comments or send me a message.
Watch the Full Episode
🎥 Hitchhiking to Burning Man... He Found Christ Instead | Landon Scates Testimony | Ep. 131
🎙️ Podcast: Raised & Redeemed on Spotify
🎥 YouTube: Michaela Nikolaenko Channel
Coming Up Next
Coming up next: In the next episode, we will be talking about an Orthodox Christian perspective on psychedelics.
